Themes for 2021

In 2019, I didn’t write resolutions, choosing instead to come up with four themes to help guide the year. They were: excellence, creativity, empathy and using my voice. Since my 7 goals for 2020 went largely unmet, I think I’ll try going back to themes this year! (One of my 2020 goals was “Say yes to travel.” What you gonna do?!) So here are three themes for 2021. Honestly, I could probably re-use the themes from two years ago since they’re still relevant. But I’ll try to come up with something new!

Stay Alert

Oh, look at that! It’s one of my goals for 2020, just reworded. Last year, I wanted to strive toward being more attentive to Joss. And…I’m not sure I got much better over the past several months. There’s a lot on our minds right now, and sometimes it’s hard to switch gears and concentrate. Especially when his dreams are so big and imaginative they don’t always translate to something I can easily understand. Add into that that I’ve been working from home quite a bit more this year, meaning that I find myself tuning out a lot when trying to accomplish my to-do list.

I think this is just another way of saying “be more intentional.” I recently discovered I’m an Enneagram 9 (“The Peacemaker”). Our biggest flaw is that we have a tendency towards slothfulness. We want to be at peace within ourselves, and sometimes the easiest way to do that is to disengage. (Not an expert, but that’s my understanding!) It’s a lot easier to be unintentional, to get drawn into patterns of behavior that aren’t necessarily productive or meaningful, but don’t cause any major/immediate distress.

This could also have a bearing on budgeting. Be more aware of where and how I’m spending money. Focus on what I’d like to save up for (a trip to London!!) and actually work toward making that happen. Someday…someday…

Quality Time

This goes hand-in-hand with not tuning out. It goes without saying that Joss and I have spent a lot of time together this year! For the coming year, it’d be nice to think about how to make that time even more meaningful. What projects could we work on together?

Right now, we’re working on a book of cake “recipes.” We’ve got the title page, table of contents, and two recipe pages. I’m trying to figure out how to motivate him to help, beyond coming up with the name of the cakes. If we finish, it will be something to be proud of! Although probably not useful to anyone actually trying to bake a cake 🙂

But he also loves singing – as do I – so maybe we could write and record songs together? Work on poetry? Comics?

He’s very much into inventing, so I should think about how to help him work towards some of those dreams. Maybe he’ll never be able to make a “bring-back-to-life-inator gadget,” but of course, there are more attainable options!

And of course, now that he can focus on longer books, we can enjoy reading chapter books together! We’ve recently read the Zoey & Sassafras books and Mac B Kid spy books that were recommended to me for my recent blog post on great books to read aloud. I can second the recommendations!

Creativity

OK, I’m reusing this one! Another one my goals for 2020 was to write 52 sonnets – 1 sonnet a week. Shouldn’t be hard, right? They’re my favorite form of poetry to write. Fourteen lines a week should have been doable. Enter the pandemic!

Since I have now written NO poetry since March, 52 sonnets seems a bit ambitious. Maybe one poem per month would be a good starting goal. Just…anything. All it would take would be choosing to write instead of watch Netflix at least one evening a month. Argh.

Along with that, I really enjoyed getting into face painting over the past year! It started out with buying Joss a kiddie set of face paints because I thought that would be a fun thing to do during quarantine. Now I have several of my own sets, and it’s so much fun, I would like to develop this new hobby. That will involve learning about shading, drawing straight lines…some basic artistic principles that seem to elude me.

Wrapping Up

Three themes for 2021 seems like enough after this past year! Of course, I want to read a lot, learn a lot, make it to the gym a couple times  a week. Get Joss back into swim lessons and maybe martial arts at some point. Keep the house a little cleaner. But we’ll just see how 2021 goes!

What are your goals for 2021? Or are you just going to let the year unfold with no added pressure? (Not a bad plan!)